The throughput of the IRSA family of multiple access protocols is analyzed using the density evolution (DE) approach, wherein two probability densities are obtained as functions of each other [1]}.
This iterative recipe provides the asymptotic performance of the system.
The asymptotic throughput has been obtained for IRSA via DE for the MAC [2]}, accounting for path loss [3]}, for the scalar Rayleigh fading channel [4]}, with multiuser detectors [5]}, for the polarized MIMO channel in satellite networks [6]}, and other enhanced variants of IRSA [7]}, [8]}.
The authors in [9]} have proposed an algorithm to detect the subset of active users in IRSA.
In contrast, this work focuses on the effect of channel estimation errors on the performance of IRSA.
A closely related protocol is pattern division multiple access (PDMA) [10]}, where users transmit their packets across a subset of REs governed by a binary APM.
A difference with PDMA is that the APM is designed in a centralized manner to maximize the so-called constellation-constrained capacity, which is not scalable to a massive number of users in mMTC.
Thus, a theoretical analysis of the throughput of the IRSA protocol under pilot contamination, accounting for the effect of channel estimation errors, path loss, fading, and multiple antennas at the BS, is not yet available in the literature, to the best of our knowledge.
